“What should we do, mister?” asked Esteban, looking worriedly down at the boy.
“Keep going. He’s beyond saving.” I knelt down next to him. “I’m sorry,” I whispered. He grabbed at my hands, gurgling hoarsely, wanting to let me know one last thing, one final message. I put my ear to his mouth as he said his last word, then he seized up and died.
I let Raquel cry over his body for hours until she grew tired and worried and I reminded her she was carrying his child, and that seemed to comfort her some. I told her I’d make sure she would get her share of the old man’s money, and I laid her down to sleep in the galley. Esteban and I cleaned the deck as best we could and then placed the body on ice down below.
It wasn’t until the sun was setting out by the Tortugas, just about an hour from Key West, that Esteban put the boat on cruise, popped open a Polar. I took a swig, the bitterness in my mouth making the beer taste almost sweet.
“So what did he tell you, mister? What did he say at the end?”
I lit another Chesterfield, watched in silence the deep blue of the Gulf begin to meld with the green waters of the shallows by the Keys. Esteban was still looking at me, waiting.
“He said Shanghai,” I answered, tossing out my cigarette.
“Shanghai? What does that mean?” asked Esteban.
I contemplated that for a moment, then I thought I should say, It’s the city of dreams, it’s the city of sex and drugs and revolution and pleasure never ending, but I realized that wouldn’t do, so I answered the only way I knew how: “Yo qué sé.”
What do I know.
Murder at 503 La Rosa
by Moisés Asís
Ayestarán
What am I going to do? That’s what I keep asking myself over and over as they lead me through the airport.
“We have a problem, sir,” the secretary at the law school had said. “You can’t take the state’s graduating exam because we found you have penal antecedents, a police record. It’s been more than twenty years, so you can ask that they be erased and then you can take the state exam,” he added in a conciliatory tone.
Of course I knew this; that police record had made a pariah out of me, without the right to study the career of my choice, without the right to seek a better job, or to have any kind of social acceptance. For more than twenty years I’d been walking around socially and politically castrated, and I’d been hoping that the University of Havana would never find out about my past if I just denied it.
“There was a mistake and it’s been rectified,” the legal adviser to the Ministry of Justice said this time, months later. “When you were tried and sentenced, you were a minor and so you should have never had an adult police record.”
You’re telling me this now, after decades of ostracism, you fucking legal adviser to the ministry?
But it’s never too late to start again. So I graduated from law school and decided not to practice, since the profession doesn’t actually allow the defense of those accused of ideological crimes such as thinking aloud. I can’t even defend myself. Under what law, and with what proceedings? I think back and I regret that I was so dismissive of that court-appointed lawyer who didn’t bother to mount a defense for me back when I was seventeen years old. Where could he be now? Has he been imprisoned for thinking without hypocrisy, has he deported himself, has he allowed himself to be debased?
After two or three hours of pedaling my bicycle, sweating my guts out, I can’t find my way home: Night has come too soon, and the stars are on vacation as it rains nonstop on this new moon. For those without direction or hope, there are no sadder nights than those that are moonless. And it won’t matter how much I plead, the moon will not so much as peek.
The last time that I couldn’t distinguish day from night was when I’d just turned seventeen and was locked up in a police cell during two weeks of questioning. The cell was windowless and it was impossible to tell the difference between dawn and the most intense noon hour. They wanted to reeducate me so that I would not only confuse day for night but so that I’d learn that good and evil were relative concepts.
I was frequently dragged from that nine-by-six cell that I shared with three other inmates and asked about my terrible crime: wanting to leave my country. Days before, the overloaded boat in which I’d hoped to row hundreds of miles had gone down near a fishing dock; we’d barely even started out on that moonless night. Nobody knew anything and there was no evidence, but a word from the political police was enough to label it a Crime Against the Integrity and Stability of the Nation. A military tribunal passed judgment on this civilian, a minor, with a court-appointed lawyer who stayed quiet, trembling, while the political police’s prosecutor presented a fantastic story that steered clear of the truth. Of the four-year sentence I was given, I only served one, in labor camps where there were also moonless nights.
The police are not very efficient, or they’re really so preoccupied with trying to deal with the miserable problems in their own homes, which they have in common with every other Cuban, that they really don’t care about doing a good job of investigating crime. They never bothered to find out how Victor, my fourth-floor neighbor at 503 La Rosa Street, died. The octogenarian passed away three days after being hospitalized. Nobody bothered to find out how he’d hit himself so many times against the wall. But all the neighbors heard him, in the silence of the blackout, and Juana the mulatta, sixty years his junior, violently shaking him.
Victor and Juana had married four years before for the exclusive benefit of the young domestic servant, who would soon inherit the apartment and a juicy widow’s pension. Now Juana and the three kids she had while married to Victor could finally enjoy a better life. Victor had been resigned to those kids, black babies who arrived one after the other without a smidgeon of their presumed father’s Caucasian DNA.
Everything might have been more believable if on the night of the wall-banging and Victor’s subsequent hospitalization, their door hadn’t been furiously kicked in by Francisco, Juana’s nocturnal lover, who arrived and couldn’t understand why she wouldn’t let him in.
Each night, Francisco, a thieving dipsomaniac from the neighborhood, would fornicate with Juana while Victor slept a few steps away. As soon as Juana became a widow, Francisco installed himself in the apartment and continued with the only things he knew how to do in his life: stealing and drinking.
They’d met at the bar adjacent to our building, at the corner of La Rosa and Ayestarán, a sad little place where lost souls would fill their bladders with alcohol only to empty them later in the neighborhood’s recesses. It was a little after the man moved in that my life became more miserable, and I decided that killing him could be rationalized as an act of justice for the greater good of society.
I should be used to these interminable blackouts, omnipresent since my early childhood. If sunlight is a gift from God that has accompanied us always and will be with us forever, electric light is also an intangible miracle that doesn’t depend on us but on a group of men who tell us day in and day out that we must save what they squander, who make the blackouts coincide with the hours in which the radio and TV broadcasts from the United States to the Cuban people are most intense. Or worse, the blackouts drag on when I need to write or study or when friends come over. The drunken thieves from the adjacent bar take advantage of the darkness to make off with what they can. It seems to me that the blackouts are a punishing reality that haunts us daily, from infancy to our deaths.